“When there is a court order, we think everybody will respect the law and would have stopped what they should have stopped because a court order has been issued against them,” Nomvuzo Shabalala, a deputy mayor in eThekwini, told South Africa’s eNCA rolling news channel, according to the Telegraph.

An executive with the company behind the construction, identified as Gralio, said “everything was above board,” according to the Telegraph, which attributed the comments to the local Mercury newspaper. The executive, Jay Singh, said that it is not uncommon for construction to begin before final plans are secured.

“Even if the plans had been passed this incident would still have happened because this was an engineering problem," Singh said. “It had nothing to do with the plans.”